Rahab

Rahab is a biblical prostitute with a heart of gold; Rahab is an agonizingly flaky novel by Waldo Frank. A contemporary review refers to the book's style as futurist, a term dropped later in favor of modernist. Published in 1922, the book shares a birthdate with The Waste Land and Ulysses but was destined never to achieve their importance. Irregularly punctuated, free-flowing, and mystical, Rahab aggressively makes the case for a new literary form. Frank's version of modernism was, however, stillborn. Isaac Bashevis Singer puts it aptly in his introduction to the 1967 reissue of Knut Hamsun's Hunger: "Writers who are truly original do not set out to fabricate new forms of expression. ... They attain their originality through extraordinary sincerity."